Organisations rely heavily on big tech services and software, such as Google Drive, Microsoft Office and social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube. For a long time, hardly anyone batted an eye. But in times of geopolitical unrest and a worrying dependence on American and Chinese big tech companies, the importance of using safe and independent technology is now widely recognised.
That’s why more and more organisations want to break away from big tech. But how do you go about it? PublicSpaces supports public and civil society organisations in becoming digitally autonomous, step by step. And because we like to share what we know, we’re joining the ‘Digital Independence Day’ initiative, recently launched in Germany by the Chaos Computer Club and Save Social together with a large group of German organisations.
Every first Sunday of the month is Digital Independence Day: a day dedicated to making the switch to privacy-friendly alternatives to big tech as easy as possible! Each month, PublicSpaces discusses alternatives that make your organisation less dependent on big tech software services. On this first Sunday of March, we’re looking at newsletter applications.
Why might leaving your current newsletter provider be a good idea?
Profiling issues
Some mailing services profile your subscribers far more than others. Mailchimp, for example, does a lot of behavioural analysis and uses AI to do so.
Like many mailing services, Mailchimp uses tracking pixels. These record whether an email has been opened, when it was opened, how many times, on which device and where the recipient was at the time (via their IP address). This data might be useful to you as the sender (though it really is a trade-off: we think tracking whether an email was opened gives you enough information), but it is also shared with Mailchimp without the recipient explicitly consenting to it.
Under the cookie law, you have to accept being tracked by cookies (hence all those pop-ups on every website). For mailings, that only happens with a double opt-in (one for subscribing to the newsletter, and one for tracking). But Mailchimp has tracking pixels switched on by default, without consent.
Autonomy issues
The internet and technology are increasingly becoming pawns in geopolitical affairs. The more of that technology sits in the US, for instance, the easier it becomes for them to take that technology offline or access the data.
That’s why it’s important to find out who the parent companies are behind the software you use. You should also look at third parties used for hosting and infrastructure, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). If a service relies on them, bits of data end up with those companies. They aren’t allowed to do anything with it, but US intelligence agencies can ultimately access it more easily (should you be interesting enough).
Whether these foreign companies’ data centres are in Europe or the US, the risks remain. Ultimately, a foreign power could access the contact lists you create with email addresses and names, the demographic data you ask for, the mailings you create and their content including images, and, finally, your own account details. This also means that when people sign up for your newsletter, they automatically consent to this, even though they may not want to or may not even realise it.
What should you consider when switching?
Before we share a list of alternatives, we’d first advise you to ask yourself what matters to your organisation. If your organisation is large enough to host its own mail server, that naturally gives you the most autonomy. But it also takes a lot of time. You could choose to have a third party take care of your hosting instead.
There are also great European open source mailing services that offer software as a service (SaaS). That way you don’t have to host anything yourself. Perfect for small organisations, then.
For the sake of transparency, you can also opt for an open source service. This means you can look at the source code, so the framework of such a service is fully transparent. The trade-off here is that it really depends on who maintains the open source service and whether they’re easy to reach when something goes wrong. Open source doesn’t automatically mean an application is good. And it often requires extra in-house technical knowledge.
The GDPR applies to processing email addresses (and any other personal data). Before you start using a newsletter tool that you don’t fully manage yourself, always make sure you sign a data processing agreement with the provider.
Finally, it’s worth thinking about the data you want to collect from your recipients, because this is often in your own hands. Ask yourself whether you really need to collect demographic data such as recipients’ gender and place of residence, or whether the number of opens gives you enough information for a newsletter. We think the latter!
How do you move to a different newsletter tool?
Moving your newsletter is usually not as complicated as, say, moving your social network to a different social platform. Unlike with social networks, almost all existing tools let you export your subscriber list, and most alternatives can import such a file. Do make sure you only transfer the email addresses of your active subscribers. Sometimes the exported file also contains old addresses of people who have unsubscribed. You don’t want to accidentally reactivate them.
Laposta
Just want to leave your American provider quickly and bring everything close to home? Then Laposta might be a good solution. Laposta is a Dutch service that makes it easy to send advanced email campaigns. If you have a limited mailing list or want to try it out first, you can start with a free account. If your newsletter grows or you want to send newsletters more often, there are various plans to upgrade your credits and functionality. With a paid subscription, for example, you can adjust the tracking settings to better protect your subscribers’ privacy, and remove the Laposta ‘badge’ from your newsletters.
For setting up a data processing agreement covering personal data, Laposta has a simple process in place.
With Laposta you’re quickly out of American hands and can send email campaigns from our very own polder. However, sovereignty or digital autonomy is just one of the values in the PublicSpaces manifesto. Because: does the tool you use really do what you expect? Isn’t data still being stored or processed somewhere after all? And what about security? And although Laposta holds various official certifications, you might still prefer software whose source code you can check (open source software, that is).
Keila.io
Want to switch easily to a paid newsletter tool provider, but find it important to use open source software? Then Keila.io might be an interesting option.
Keila is built and hosted by our eastern neighbours in Germany, so nice and European. It has all the features you’d expect: from segmentation and personalised emails to statistics (which you can switch off if you like) and an API.
But what really sets Keila apart from tools like Laposta is that the entire development process is transparent (another value from the PublicSpaces manifesto), and that a community of users and coders contributes to and has a say in the product’s roadmap. This means you can help think up new features, help solve problems and bugs, and improve the tool you use together. Security experts can also easily check the software for vulnerabilities, so they can be fixed.
So by taking out a paid subscription with Keila, you actually get two things for the price of one: a solid tool for sending newsletters, and a contribution to the development of an open source commons that everyone can benefit from.
Because Keila is open source, you can also install it on your own server without licence fees. For some organisations, it’s very important not to hand subscriber data over to an external processor, but to keep it under their own control. For others, it’s important to avoid vendor lock-in and not depend on external suppliers that could be bought out or call it quits. Important: if you self-host, no data can end up with AWS, which Keila (optionally) uses for the ‘Send with Keila’ option in its subscriptions (i.e. for sending emails).
Listmonk.app
At PublicSpaces, we also use a tool to send our monthly newsletters. Because the values in our manifesto carry extra weight for us, we chose Listmonk.
Listmonk is a fairly simple, 100% open source newsletter tool. It lets you build different lists, and you can create and send campaigns using a simple editor. The tool offers options for personalising newsletters, and you can pull up basic statistics (although, as you might expect, we’ve switched tracking off).
Unlike Keila, Listmonk isn’t developed by a company that also offers it as a service (software as a service). You can download, use or adapt Listmonk, but always under your own management. Don’t have your own server (or server administrator) at hand? There are hosting providers happy to take care of that for you. In the Netherlands, Procolix offers this for a friendly price, and various European providers do too, such as Alpenhost from Austria or Elest.io from Ireland.
Hosting a newsletter tool yourself gives you a great deal of autonomy, but there are a few catches. Large email services do everything they can to keep unwanted email out, and have strict spam filters that decide whether a message lands in the inbox. To get through, you’ll need to dig into how SPF, DKIM and DMARC records in your DNS can make sure your emails are let through. And yes, that’s a very technical story, and certainly no 100% guarantee that your emails won’t occasionally end up in a spam folder. Want even more certainty? Then we strongly recommend using a separate SMTP relay server, for example via the Dutch Soverin, Lettermint or one of these European email services.
Ghost
Finally, a recommendation with a slightly different angle. The tools discussed above are all designed for sending email campaigns and business newsletters. In terms of functionality and approach, they’re comparable to Mailchimp. But lately there’s also been a big rise in newsletters sent via Substack.
Substack is a platform widely used by individuals, influencers, journalists and others to build their own audience through (free or paid) personal newsletters. Is this blog-like style of newsletter something for (people in) your organisation, but do you, for certain reasons, have no desire to send it via Substack? Then take a look at Ghost.
With Ghost you can send newsletters and publish them on your own website, with a paywall if you like. That makes it a blog and newsletter tool in one.
British-born Ghost is run by a non-profit foundation in Singapore. Want to use Ghost, but closer to home? You can, of course, because Ghost is also open source and can be self-hosted nearby.
Besides blogging and sending newsletters, Ghost has also supported ActivityPub since last year: the protocol also used by Mastodon, PeerTube and other Fediverse applications. This makes it possible to exchange newsletters and articles with other authors, or to let people follow your newsletter via Mastodon.
A few disclaimers
Everything is in flux
Companies can always change. What is a foundation today could become a for-profit company tomorrow. What is a European provider today could later be bought up by a Chinese company. So always stay alert to the infrastructure behind the tools and services you use. Check it, for example, once a year for your entire digital infrastructure.
Tip: with open source products you host yourself, you always sidestep this. What’s in your own hands stays in your own hands.
This wasn’t an exhaustive list of alternatives
There are many more mailing tools and providers out there. We’ve given a selection of distinctive providers, each with their own special features. For more alternatives, take a look at Open Alternative, European Alternatives and Open Source Alternative.
Every organisation is different
Which tool suits your organisation best depends on many factors: Do you have the in-house knowledge to host and manage things yourself? How much do you value ownership and control over your data? Are you a small or a large organisation? What systems and processes does it need to integrate with? And what’s your budget? So unfortunately we can’t give you a clear-cut answer, but we hope we’ve helped you on your way!
